Marginalia

Marginalia draws our attention to the overlooked elements that coexist in carefully designed books. Removing the text and images from a selection of art books designed by Anja Lutz in close collaboration with the individual artists reveals the nondescript details: the margins, the edges, the backgrounds, the spaces between the lines …

Each book is unique in its choice of format, material, layout, composition, and rhythm. The selected pages underwent a process of transformation in which Lutz dissected them with surgical precision, layer by layer, removing their vital parts and revealing their skeletons – the actual support of the content. The results are filigree grids, fragments of images, and traces of the layout that form intricately layered compositions of voids, exposing the hidden relationships between the pages.

Marginalia is an investigation into the anatomy of books – the physical object, its materiality, and inner structure. It is an attempt at mediating the emptiness. The quiet and yet eloquent remaining spaces seem to have their own language – that of an abstract visual poetry of books.